Milly indeed at last couldn’t say; so that she had really for the time brought it along to the point so oddly marked for her by her visitor’s arrival, the truth that she was enviably strong. She carried this out, from that evening, for each hour still left her, and the more easily perhaps that the hours were now narrowly numbered. All she actually waited for was Sir Luke Strett’s promised visit; as to her proceeding on which, however, her mind was quite made up. Since he wanted to get at Susie he should have the freest access, and then perhaps he would see how he liked it. What was between them they might settle as between them, and any pressure it should lift from her own spirit they were at liberty to convert to their use. If the dear man wished to fire Susan Shepherd with a still higher ideal, he would only after all, at the worst, have Susan on his hands. If devotion, in a word, was what it would come up for the interested pair to organise, she was herself ready to consume it as the dressed and served dish. He had talked to her of her “appetite,” her account of which, she felt, must have been vague. But for devotion, she could now see, this appetite would be of the best. Gross, greedy, ravenous—these were doubtless the proper names for her: she was at all events resigned in advance to the machinations of sympathy. The day that followed her lonely excursion was to be the last but two or three of their stay in London; and the evening of that day practically ranked for them as, in the matter of outside relations, the last of all. People were by this time quite scattered, and many of those who had so liberally manifested in calls, in cards, in evident sincerity about visits, later on, over the land, had positively passed in music out of sight; whether as members, these latter, more especially, of Mrs. Lowder’s immediate circle or as members of Lord Mark’s—our friends being by this time able to make the distinction. The general pitch had thus decidedly dropped, and the occasions still to be dealt with were special and few. One of these, for Milly, announced itself as the doctor’s call already mentioned, as to which she had now had a note from him: the single other, of importance, was their appointed leave-taking—for the shortest separation—in respect to Mrs. Lowder and Kate. The aunt and the niece were to dine with them alone, intimately and easily—as easily as should be consistent with the question of their afterwards going on together to some absurdly belated party, at which they had had it from Aunt Maud that they would do well to show. Sir Luke was to make his appearance on the morrow of this, and in respect to that complication Milly had already her plan.
The night was at all events hot and stale, and it was late enough by the time the four ladies had been gathered in, for their small session, at the hotel, where the windows were still open to the high balconies and the flames of the candles, behind the pink shades—disposed as for the vigil of watchers—were motionless in the air in which the season lay dead. What was presently settled among them was that Milly, who betrayed on this occasion a preference more marked than usual, shouldn’t hold herself obliged to climb that evening the social stair, however it might stretch to meet her, and that, Mrs. Lowder and Mrs. Stringham facing the ordeal together, Kate Croy should remain with her and await their return. It was a pleasure to Milly, ever, to send Susan Shepherd forth; she saw her go with complacency, liked, as it were, to put people off with her, and noted with satisfaction, when she so moved to the carriage, the further denudation—a markedly ebbing tide—of her little benevolent back. If it wasn’t quite Aunt Maud’s ideal, moreover, to take out the new American girl’s funny friend instead of the new American girl herself, nothing could better indicate the range of that lady’s merit than the spirit in which—as at the present hour for instance—she made the best of the minor advantage. And she did this with a broad cheerful absence of illusion; she did it—confessing even as much to poor Susie—because, frankly, she was good-natured. When Mrs. Stringham observed that her own light was too abjectly borrowed and that it was as a link alone, fortunately not missing, that she was valued, Aunt Maud concurred to the extent of the remark: “Well, my dear, you’re better than nothing.” To-night furthermore it came up for Milly that Aunt Maud had something particular in mind. Mrs. Stringham, before adjourning with her, had gone off for some shawl or other accessory, and Kate, as if a little impatient for their withdrawal, had wandered out to the balcony, where she hovered for the time unseen, though with scarce more to look at than the dim London stars and the cruder glow, up the street, on a corner, of a small public-house in front of which a fagged cab-horse was thrown into relief. Mrs. Lowder made use of the moment: Milly felt as soon as she had spoken that what she was doing was somehow for use.
“Dear Susan tells me that you saw in America Mr. Densher—whom I’ve never till now, as you may have noticed, asked you about. But do you mind at last, in connexion with him, doing something for me?” She had lowered her fine voice to a depth, though speaking with all her rich glibness; and Milly, after a small sharpness of surprise, was already guessing the sense of her appeal. “Will you name him, in any way you like, to her”—and Aunt Maud gave a nod at the window; “so that you may perhaps find out whether he’s back?”
Ever so many things, for Milly, fell into line at this; it was a wonder, she afterwards thought, that she could be conscious of so many at once. She smiled hard, however, for them all. “But I don’t know that it’s important to me to ‘find out.’ ” The array of things was further swollen, however, even as she said this, by its striking her as too much to say. She therefore tried as quickly to say less. “Except you mean of course that it’s important to you.” She fancied Aunt Maud was looking at her almost as hard as she was herself smiling, and that gave her another impulse. “You know I never have yet named him to her; so that if I should break out now—”
“Well?”—Mrs. Lowder waited.
“Why she may wonder what I’ve been making a mystery of. She hasn’t mentioned him, you know,” Milly went on, “herself.”
“No”—her friend a little heavily weighed it—“she wouldn’t. So it’s she, you see then, who has made the mystery.”
Yes, Milly but wanted to see; only there was so much. “There has been of course no particular reason.” Yet that indeed was neither here nor there. “Do you think,” she asked, “he is back?”
“It will be about his time, I gather, and rather a comfort to me definitely to know.”
“Then can’t you ask her yourself?”
“Ah we never speak of him!”
It helped Milly for the moment to the convenience of a puzzled pause. “Do you mean he’s an acquaintance of whom you disapprove for her?”
Aunt Maud, as well, just hung fire. “I disapprove of her for the poor young man. She doesn’t care for him.”
“And he cares so much—?”
“Too much, too much. And my fear is,” said Mrs. Lowder, “that he privately besets her. She keeps it to herself, but I don’t want her worried. Neither, in truth,” she both generously and confidentially concluded, “do I want him.”
Milly showed all her own effort to meet the case. “But what can I do?”
“You can find out where they are. If I myself try,” Mrs. Lowder explained, “I shall appear to treat them as if I supposed them deceiving me.”
“And you don’t. You don’t,” Milly mused for her, “suppose them deceiving you.”
“Well,” said Aunt Maud, whose fine onyx eyes failed to blink even though Milly’s questions might have been taken as drawing her rather further than she had originally meant to go—“well, Kate’s thoroughly aware of my views for her, and that I take her being with me at present, in the way she is with me, if you know what I mean, for a loyal assent to them. Therefore as my views don’t happen to provide a place at all for Mr. Densher, much, in a manner, as I like him”—therefore in short she had been prompted to this step, though she completed her sense, but sketchily, with the rattle of her large fan.
It assisted them for the moment perhaps, however, that Milly was able to pick out of her sense what might serve as the clearest part of it. “You do like him then?”
“Oh dear yes. Don’t you?”
Milly waited, for the question was somehow as the sudden point of something sharp on a nerve that winced. She just caught her breath, but she had ground for joy afterwards, she felt, in not really having failed to choose with quickness sufficient, out of fifteen possible answers, the one that would best serve her. She was then almost proud, as well, that she had cheerfully smiled. “I did—three times—in New York.” So came and went, in these simple words, the speech that was to figure for her later on, that night, as the one she had ever uttered that cost her most. She was to lie awake for the gladness of not having taken any line so really inferior as the denial of a happy impression.
For Mrs. Lowder also moreover her simple words were the right ones; they were at any rate, that lady’s laugh showed, in the natural note of the racy. “You dear American thing! But people may be very good and yet not good for what one wants.”
“Yes,” the girl assented, “even I suppose when what one wants is something very good.”
“Oh my child, it would take too long just now to tell you all I want! I want everything at once and together—and ever so much for you too, you know. But you’ve seen us,” Aunt Maud continued; “you’ll have made out.”
“Ah,” said Milly, “I don’t make out;” for again—it came that way in rushes—she felt an obscurity in things. “Why, if our friend here doesn’t like him—”
“Should I conceive her interested in keeping things from me?” Mrs. Lowder did justice to the question. “My dear, how can you ask? Put yourself in her place. She meets me, but on her terms. Proud young women are proud young women. And proud old ones are—well, what I am. Fond of you as we both are, you can help us.”
Milly tried to be inspired. “Does it come back then to my asking her straight?”
At this, however, finally, Aunt Maud threw her up. “Oh if you’ve so many reasons not—!”
“I’ve not so many,” Milly smiled—“but I’ve one. If I break out so suddenly on my knowing him, what will she make of my not having spoken before?”
Mrs. Lowder looked blank at it. “Why should you care what she makes? You may have only been decently discreet.”
“Ah I have been,” the girl made haste to say.
“Besides,” her friend went on, “I suggested to you, through Susan, your line.”
“Yes, that reason’s a reason for me.”
“And for me,” Mrs. Lowder insisted. “She’s not therefore so stupid as not to do justice to grounds so marked. You can tell her perfectly that I had asked you to say nothing.”
“And may I tell her that you’ve asked me now to speak?”
Mrs. Lowder might well have thought, yet, oddly, this pulled her up. “You can’t do it without—?”
Milly was almost ashamed to be raising so many difficulties. “I’ll do what I can if you’ll kindly tell me one thing more.” She faltered a little—it was so prying; but she brought it out. “Will he have been writing to her?”
“It’s exactly, my dear, what I should like to know!” Mrs. Lowder was at last impatient. “Push in for yourself and I dare say she’ll tell you.”
Even now, all the same, Milly had not quite fallen back. “It will be pushing in,” she continued to smile, “for you.” She allowed her companion, however, no time to take this up. “The point will be that if he has been writing she may have answered.”
“But what point, you subtle thing, is that?”
“It isn’t subtle, it seems to me, but quite simple,” Milly said, “that if she has answered she has very possibly spoken of me.”
“Very certainly indeed. But what difference will it make?”
The girl had a moment, at this, of thinking it natural Mrs. Lowder herself should so fail of subtlety. “It will make the difference that he’ll have written her in reply that he knows me. And that, in turn,” our young woman explained, “will give an oddity to my own silence.”
“How so, if she’s perfectly aware of having given you no opening? The only oddity,” Aunt Maud lucidly professed, “is for yourself. It’s in her not having spoken.”
“Ah there we are!” said Milly.
And she had uttered it, evidently, in a tone that struck her friend. “Then it has troubled you?”
But the enquiry had only to be made to bring the rare colour with fine inconsequence to her face. “Not really the least little bit!” And, quickly feeling the need to abound in this sense, she was on the point, to cut short, of declaring that she cared, after all, no scrap how much she obliged. Only she felt at this instant too the intervention of still other things. Mrs. Lowder was in the first place already beforehand, already affected as by the sudden vision of her having herself pushed too far. Milly could never judge from her face of her uppermost motive—it was so little, in its hard smooth sheen, that kind of human countenance. She looked hard when she spoke fair; the only thing was that when she spoke hard she didn’t likewise look soft. Something, none the less, had arisen in her now—a full appreciable tide, entering by the rupture of some bar. She announced that if what she had asked was to prove in the least a bore her young friend was not to dream of it; making her young friend at the same time, by the change in her tone, dream on the spot more profusely. She spoke, with a belated light, Milly could apprehend—she could always apprehend—from pity; and the result of that perception, for the girl, was singular: it proved to her as quickly that Kate, keeping her secret, had been straight with her. From Kate distinctly then, as to why she was to be pitied, Aunt Maud knew nothing, and was thereby simply putting in evidence the fine side of her own character. This fine side was that she could almost at any hour, by a kindled preference or a diverted energy, glow for another interest than her own. She exclaimed as well, at this moment, that Milly must have been thinking round the case much more than she had supposed; and this remark could affect the girl as quickly and as sharply as any other form of the charge of weakness. It was what every one, if she didn’t look out, would soon be saying—“There’s something the matter with you!” What one was therefore one’s self concerned immediately to establish was that there was nothing at all. “I shall like to help you; I shall like, so far as that goes, to help Kate herself,” she made such haste as she could to declare; her eyes wandering meanwhile across the width of the room to that dusk of the balcony in which their companion perhaps a little unaccountably lingered. She suggested hereby her impatience to begin; she almost overtly wondered at the length of the opportunity this friend was giving them—referring it, however, so far as words went, to the other friend and breaking off with an amused: “How tremendously Susie must be beautifying!”
It only marked Aunt Maud, none the less, as too preoccupied for her allusion. The onyx eyes were fixed upon her with a polished pressure that must signify some enriched benevolence. “Let it go, my dear. We shall after all soon enough see.”
“If he has come back we shall certainly see,” Milly after a moment replied; “for he’ll probably feel that he can’t quite civilly not come to see me. Then there,” she remarked, “we shall be. It wouldn’t then, you see, come through Kate at all—it would come through him. Except,” she wound up with a smile, “that he won’t find me.”
She had the most extraordinary sense of interesting her guest, in spite of herself, more than she wanted; it was as if her doom so floated her on that she couldn’t stop—by very much the same trick it had played her with her doctor. “Shall you run away from him?”
She neglected the question, wanting only now to get off. “Then,” she went on, “you’ll deal with Kate directly.”
“Shall you run away from her?” Mrs. Lowder profoundly enquired, while they became aware of Susie’s return through the room, opening out behind them, in which they had dined.
This affected Milly as giving her but an instant; and suddenly, with it, everything she felt in the connexion rose to her lips for a question that even as she put it, she knew she was failing to keep colourless. “Is it your own belief that he is with her?”
Aunt Maud took it in—took in, that is, everything of the tone that she just wanted her not to; and the result for some seconds was but to make their eyes meet in silence. Mrs. Stringham had rejoined them and was asking if Kate had gone—an enquiry at once answered by this young lady’s reappearance. They saw her again in the open window, where, looking at them, she had paused—producing thus on Aunt Maud’s part almost too impressive a “Hush!” Mrs. Lowder indeed without loss of time smothered any danger in a sweeping retreat with Susie; but Milly’s words to her, just uttered, about dealing with her niece directly, struck our young woman as already recoiling on herself. Directness, however evaded, would be, fully, for her; nothing in fact would ever have been for her so direct as the evasion. Kate had remained in the window, very handsome and upright, the outer dark framing in a highly favourable way her summery simplicities and lightnesses of dress. Milly had, given the relation of space, no real fear she had heard their talk; only she hovered there as with conscious eyes and some added advantage. Then indeed, with small delay, her friend sufficiently saw. The conscious eyes, the added advantage were but those she had now always at command—those proper to the person Milly knew as known to Merton Densher. It was for several seconds again as if the total of her identity had been that of the person known to him—a determination having for result another sharpness of its own. Kate had positively but to be there just as she was to tell her he had come back. It seemed to pass between them in fine without a word that he was in London, that he was perhaps only round the corner; and surely therefore no dealing of Milly’s with her would yet have been so direct.